Malachy Clerkin: Banks using sport to sanitise their image

"Ireland's fitness and probity regime is still evolving," ran a quote from a source in the business pages of the Sunday Times yesterday. It was the last line of a piece about Irish banks and their latest run-in with the regulators.

This time it was the incorrigibly finable AIB who had to stump up €2.3 million to the Central Bank for breaking rules designed to prevent money laundering and financing of terrorism.

This is the fourth fine AIB has had to pay the Central Bank for breaching regulations since 2006. While that makes them record holders – no other bank has been fined that many times – their cash total in fines only comes to €5.8 million and leaves them trailing in the wake of the market leader, Ulster Bank.

Indeed, when it comes to coughing up naughty-step money, Ulster Bank is way out on their own, having had to hand over a cool €10.8 million since 2006. They had their own dalliance with the Criminal Justice (Money Laundering & Terrorist Financing) Act at the back end of last year and ended up enriching the Central Bank to the tune of €3.3 million.

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Putting it politely

So yeah, putting it politely, Ireland’s fitness and probity regime is still evolving. It’s evolving so hard right now that the Central Bank has had to double the number of staff in its money-laundering division in just the last three years.

And you know what else is evolving? The tracker mortgage scandal. The one where 15 Irish lenders have admitted to denying customers either the right or option to the tracker interest rates they were entitled to.

As a result, anything up to 15,000 mortgage holders have had to pay more for their mortgages than they should. Plenty have gone into arrears, some have lost their homes.

Not one or two financial institutions, 15 of them, including all the big guys. AIB has admitted that 14 families had their house repossessed because of the practice. For Ulster Bank, that number is 15. So far, banks have paid out €78 million in redress compensation and they concede that there will be more to come as the situation evolves.

Ulster Bank has put aside €211 million to cover the compensation it will have to pay. AIB's number is €190 million. Permanent TSB €140 million. Bank Of Ireland €25 million. And on and on and on.

This stuff swills through the news week by week, to the point where most people basically become inured to it. Granted, these are the heroes that bankrupted the country a decade ago so a little Central Bank fine here and there probably doesn’t seem like all that big a deal.

And if that’s the country we live in and the world we choose to be relaxed about, so be it. Maybe it doesn’t do to get too overworked.

Image-friendly is in the eye of the beholder, though. Say what you like about the beer companies, they didn't bankrupt the State.

Here's a thing, though. Most of these banks use sport to sanitise their image. Whether it's AIB sponsoring the club championships or Ulster Bank sponsoring club rugby or Bank of Ireland splaying their name across every Munster and Leinster rugby shirt in the country, they all do their bit for sport and somewhere along the way, less of a fuss is made over the whole causing-people-to-lose-their-homes carry-on.

And that’s fine actually, as it goes. All sports need money and the more the GAA or IRFU or FAI or whoever can finagle out of these sponsorships, the less – in theory – they need to squeeze out of punters paying through the gate. And if more of it goes down into grassroots and saves already over-extended club lifers having to wreck their heads with endless fundraisers, all the better.

It would be perverse to expend too much energy on holier-than-thou protests at the oily ways of the banks. Just take their money and get on with getting on.

Gross double-standard

But more and more, it feels like there’s a gross double-standard here. All those years of griping and lobbying and all those acres of newsprint that were used up trying to kick alcohol sponsorship out of sport was for what, exactly?

The GAA were essentially shamed out of a sponsorship arrangement they’d had with Guinness a few years ago, one going back almost two decades. Even though government policy allows it, the pressure to move on to more image-friendly revenue streams eventually told.

Image-friendly is in the eye of the beholder, though. Say what you like about the beer companies, they didn’t bankrupt the State. They didn’t transgress laws designed to prevent the financing of terrorist activity and they don’t currently have a war chest running into the hundreds of millions to compensate victims of a national scandal.

Alcohol brings its own attendant woes to the world, no question. But placed in the context of what the banks have been up to, you have to question why they’re viewed as being so much more toxic to sporting bodies.

There’s no simple answer. Some of it is class, certainly. Getting on your high horse about alcohol sponsorship is easy because the ravages of drink are easy to point to in society. But banks are different, or they’re seen as different.

At least for now, they are. If they keep racking up fines and redress schemes though, maybe that will change.

And maybe we’ll all have to be a bit more adult about who sporting bodies choose to align themselves with.